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If one has has some billions (Order 10^9) of nodes, and on the order of millions of interconnections for each (Total Order 10^15), in essence, one has a human brain. Increase the interconnections and the learning capacity and intelligence grows. While the map of reality is limited to the node number for a neural net as proven by researchers at Caltech in the 1980s, nonetheless the "grasp" of the details of complexity sises with the number of interconnections -- the unification of the whole.

In the Internet "Humanity Brain," economics tends to provided more bandwidth to channels carrying more information from more users--corresponding, it would seem, to the weighting of neural-net interconnections according to signal voting history per Hebbian learning theory.

We have here, in parallel with the globalization formation of a new "baby" Whole Humanity's body, a worthy brain in its last stages of intensive REM sleep that fetus's need to have. That healthy new baby will be born into crisis (isn't all new birth a time of crisis?)--but one it is particularly evolved to handle far better, unimaginable orders of magnitude more brilliantly, harmoniously, balanced--via a new form of homeostasis--than we individual humans have ever been able to muster.

Realizing both that the real information will rest in the combined knowledge between nodes, not in any single one, and that this knowledge is thus global--the issue of information is not private ownership any more than it can be for single brain cells (though, as there, there may be some temporary responsibilities of particular point memories assigned by the whole, more general responsibilities of certain regions). As such, the discussion of ethics must keep pace with all this and transfer over into the crucial need for mutual responsibility, community, etc. Creating or encrusting brain tumors in our joint brain is in no ones interest, including the tumors though they may not realize it till the bitter end.

Ethics indeed, but toward mutual responsibility in the atomic, and global integration into this whole through new paths in integral education. To a new ethics of life and hope my fellow members of the community, nay family, nay unity of Humanity--yes let us travel. Let us know that we depend on everyone, and they us, and so will the crucial glue of trust arrive. But let us not try to steer back into our every-man-for-him-self (or client special interest group) life boat ethics--till the lucky "winner" fall dead atop the bodies of the "losers." Read more

Several points on the conservative and liberal end of the proposed debate:(1) It is clear enough that there is some corporate propriety involved in disciplining the internet. It seems possible that government is as willing or able to use corporate resources as the corporations themselves.(2) As I have noted elsewhere, there is a danger in avoiding citizenship-identity concerns, as these, I feel, have vast potentials with technology. For example, the younger generation is frequently treated as 'gamers' who bargain for degrees of real or artificial inclusion. Gaming is also where education is going, if you haven't noticed. In my mind this means more role for citizenship, and hence government.(3) Perhaps a larger or more direct question in this article (besides the centrality of government and the role of the citizen gamer), is that virtuality is of course embraced by many, which is a kind of flag signal for meeting human interest demands on the internet / metaverse / hyperverse / or what have you. I predict greater roles in the future for meaningful information, interpretation of preferences, and customized products, in ways that ultimately do not need to relate with marketing as it is known today. More and more frequently, users will want only custom content, creating a weakness towards virtual solutions, and therefore creating a log-jamb of people who have very little money but a lot of know-how about the future of the metaverse. It would be a tragedy not to take advantage of the crowd-sourcing potential of the lower-income groups who have a single laptop or smart-phone and feel the urge to influence society for the better. Maybe this is a Generation Y thing, but I suspect at least in the context of gaming, that it involves Z as well. Part of that attitude towards gaming instead of larger questions may be a response to attitudes about marketing. So I also think corporations and marketers should be more responsible about the reciprocal needs of consumers (on the converse side, generation Z may have received slightly better education, but I'm not sure of this).(4) To conclude, the world of electronics depends on theories of exceptionalism (or instead exception-ism, that is, the mapping of exceptions in a standardized way), such as the incidence of high-speed internet at Stanford University, investigations into thought experiments at Yale, or global networking at Harvard. But the future also depends on the technical techniques and technologies which supplement or serve as exponents for these data-infrastructure states. There is a need for new theories, but not facile ones, instead theories which bind concepts of infrastructure with concepts of dynamic information. Read more

The Rights of the digital man should not make the responsibilities look pale, the shifting weights from rights to responsibilities is part of this world's rite of passage. Bitcoin for example, which is taking so much of space in the media, if we look at the social responsibilities around that innovation, something is missing. Let me take Bitcoin to exemplify how speculation gets the better of social value in our innovations:The chronological arrogance that Bitcoin valuation would portend (belies the social purpose of this innovation) in the future as there are going to be fixed 21m Bitcoins ever, is in sharp contrast to the deflationary spiral that this could induce; regulatory challenges notwithstanding, the real test would be in defining the capacity of what absence of transaction does to the transaction costs, which today could be low, but with banks stepping in, you better watch out. Such is the nature of fall-outs in some areas of digital innovation, where we better be concerned with responsibilities than rights, per se.Read more

PS On Air: The Super Germ Threat

NOV 2, 2016

In the latest edition of PS On
Air
, Jim O’Neill discusses how to beat antimicrobial resistance, which
threatens millions of lives, with Gavekal Dragonomics’ Anatole Kaletsky
and Leonardo Maisano of
Il Sole 24 Ore.

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